Though it is not necessary for students to memorise pi these days it is important that they are familiar with it and can use a rough approximation of it to estimate answers to questions. This exercise certainly helps students become familiar with pi but also uses pi as an arbitrary subject of this memory challenge.

Incidently, in the days when memorising pi was important people devised mnemonics such as “How I wish I could calculate pi” where the number of letters in each word represent the first seven digits of pi. Do you know any other mnemonics for remembering pi?
Please let us know.

I absolutely love many of your problems. I search for open-ended ones & your site usually provides a lot of them! Thanks!One suggestion I have is to always have one matching a holiday. I really enjoy incorporating the holidays/current events. I see you have a great upcoming one for Valentine's Day. You provided a fun one on Halloween.A few that I would like to see added:a Mardi Gras week or at least one on Fat TuesdaySuper Bowl100th Day (or related to the number 100, I realize this varies from school to school, but maybe a week's worth of questions geared toward this celebration)St. Patrick's DayKeep up the excellent problems for our students.Greatly appreciated!Veterans Day.

Transum,

You may have scrolled this far down the page and missed the buttons above that allow you to vary the amount of time pi is visible on the screen. This function adds urgency and excitement to the memorising part of the lesson. You choose the time that would work best for your class. Happy Pi Day!

Matthew Zhao, Craigslea State Primary School

Starting from last year, I have memorised pi to 100 digits. I purposely finished memorising 100 digits on March 12th. March 13th was for practice and March 14th was for presentation.

Will, Carshalton Boys

Afterwards, I showed the class the world record holders. They loved it. http://pi-world-ranking-list.com/lists/memo/.

Transum,

The first time a digit repeats six times in succession in pi is at the 762nd position where you can find six nines in a row. This is known as the Feynman Point.

Joke,

An opinion without 3.14159265359 is just an onion.

Transum,

The Welsh mathematician William Jones (1675–1749) introduced the symbol π in 1706, most likely after the Greek word for periphery, which starts with the letter π.

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How does the circumference of a glass compare to the height of the glass? You'll be surprised when you find out.

Your access to the majority of the Transum resources continues to be free but you can help support the continued growth of the website by doing your Amazon shopping using the links on this page. Below is an Amazon search box and some items chosen and recommended by Transum Mathematics to get you started.

Hello World

You are buying a (driverless) car. One vehicle is programmed to save as many lives as possible in a collision. Another promises to prioritize the lives of its passengers. Which do you choose?

Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions – in healthcare, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go even who we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want?

Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us. In Hello World she lifts the lid on their inner workings, demonstrates their power, exposes their limitations, and examines whether they really are an improvement on the humans they are replacing. more...

Pie In The Sky

Must-watch Pi videos

Cartoon Maths

Pi and Four Fingers

In this video mathematician Simon Singh talks about Pi and Maths in The Simpsons cartoon.

The short web address is:

Transum.org/go/?to=pi4fingers

Watch and Learn

Facts About Pi

Mathematician Presh Talwalkar explains five facts you should know about pi.

The short web address is:

Transum.org/go/?to=pifacts

Great Video

A Brief History of Pi

A video from Simon Clark presenting a deep but accessible account of the history of pi.

The short web address is:

Transum.org/go/?to=pihistoryvideo

Unexpected places to find Pi

Euler's identity

\( e^{i \pi}+1 = 0 \)

Where \(e\) is Euler's number, the base of natural logarithms (2.718...) and\(i\) is the imaginary unit, the square root of negative one.

Sum of Reciprocals of Squares

First posed by Mengoli in 1650 and solved by Euler in 1734 this is known as The Basel problem.

Integration

\( \displaystyle\int_{-\infty}^\infty e^{-x^2}dx=\sqrt\pi \)

Even calculus has a use for pi as can be seen in this integration.

Factorial

\( ( \frac12 )! = \frac{\sqrt{\pi}}{2} \)

I didn't know you could find the factorial of a fraction.

Matt Parker's new book is all about our mistakes and misadventures with maths, geometry and all things numbers. Going from the mundane as to arguments about how many days in a week and the shape of footballs on signs, to famous errors and mistakes like the Space Shuttle disaster, London's walkie talkie building and the Millennium wobbly bridge. He explains how these problems occurred and in the case of some that they had occured in the past and we hadn't learnt from previous experience.

Originally a maths teacher from Australia, Matt Parker now lives in Godalming in a house full of almost every retro video-game console ever made. He is fluent in binary and could write your name in a sequence of noughts and ones in seconds. He loves doing maths and stand-up, often simultaneously.